Germany and The Netherlands

Back to Doing Business Abroad main page

Late 2021, Germany showed interest to pilot UC1 based on the DBA infrastructure. For this, the state of Nordrhine Westfalia set up a pilot with The Netherlands, after Germany entered the DE4A Consortium as an observer.

Objectives and approach

The pilot was performed in a light weight approach, focussing on the main objective for Germany. This was to learn about the implementation of the SDG from a legal, organizational, technical and business perspective. More explicit learning goals and challenges were defined in a report as a result of the first phase of the pilot. The second phase concerned the implementation phase, which was completed within 6 months (!). The final phase was the pilot running phase, which took 2 weeks.

The city of Dusseldorf acted as DE, while the eProcedure was facilitated by a Shared portal (the Wirthaftsportal) that provides several eProcedures on behalf of multiple public authorities in the state of Nordrhine Westfalia. On the Dutch side, the Kamer van Koophandel (Business Register) acted as DO. For the pilot, The Netherlands could re-use the DE4A solution that was already in place, consisting of the DO integration with the DE4A Connector, the DE4A Connector itself and eIDAS infrastructure. Germany adapted the Wirtschaftsportal, set up eIDAS infrastructure for piloting and integrated all with the back-office from the city of Dusseldorf.

Main results

Germany learned that the pilot solution was implementable without any adjustment of laws. Many challenges were found during the technical implementation for the pilot, but none were extra-ordinary compared to regular implementations within DE4A pilots. The technical implementation as described above, was ready within 6 months.

4 real Dutch companies completed the eProcedure in the Wirtschaftsportal, including authentication and validation of powers, and including payment for the requested service. For pilot purposes, the registrations were invalidated by the city of Dusseldorf after evaluation had taken place.